Both Clintons were making history this week, but Hillary made the biggest headlines and attracted the world's media when she launched her campaign to become a New York senator in 2000.
On the day she struck out on her own after 23 years of getting Bill Clinton elected to various offices, he was the first President to make a working visit to Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota where he promised an impoverished Sioux tribe a better life.
Hillary in upstate New York was following ancient trails of the Iroquois and the Mohawks, as she embarked on her "Listening Tour" to hear about the issues that bother this beautiful but economically run-down region.
The big question was not what she thinks about her favourite issues like education and healthcare, but why she is doing this at all. Is it to get away from a husband who is a lame-duck President for the next 18 months? Is it revenge for humiliating her with his dalliance with a White House intern?
Does a career in the hidebound Senate with its old-boy network and fusty rules really appeal to her, or does she see it a stepping stone to becoming the first woman president some day?
Needless to say, Hillary was not answering those questions. As she faced the press standing beside the patriarchal Senator Pat Moynihan, whose seat she hopes to fill on his retirement, she did the neat political trick of asking the questions herself.
"Now I suppose the question on everybody's mind is, `Why the Senate and why New York and why me?' All I can say is I care deeply about the issues that are important in this state that I've already been learning about and hearing about."
She went on: "I would be, if I run and am honoured to be elected, a strong and effective advocate on the part of the people of New York. I'm very excited about this."
So, of course, are the media, and far more of them turned up at the Moynihan farm outside Oneonta than to hear President Clinton addressing the problems of the Pine Ridge reservation.
From the moment her Air Force Gulfstream jet touched down at Binghamton last Wednesday, the media circus was in full cry. No detail would be too mundane.
When the First Lady showed she was human like the rest of us and visited the ladies' loo at a rest stop on the way to Oneonta, a female reporter followed and interviewed the woman and her two daughters who shared the facilities with her. They were thrilled.
Hillary in her green Ford minivan flanked by the Secret Service vehicles was pursued by an 18-wheel juggernaut with "Go Home Hillary" painted on the sides in huge letters.
Other protesters stood at rural crossroads holding signs saying "This is Rudy Country", Rudy being Mayor Giuliani of New York, her likely Republican opponent for the Senate seat.
A ridiculous exchange has broken out between their respective supporters as to who knows the geography of upstate New York best.
For Mrs Clinton there is the Monica Lewinsky shadow and half-buried investigations into her role, if any, in the Whitewater property scam. Monica she ignored, and as for the other stuff, "I think we've moved beyond all of it," she said briskly. Next question, please.
What about the "carpetbagger" accusation? Isn't she like the Yankee business sharks who moved to the defeated South after the Civil War with their belongings in a bag made out of carpet pieces? She was not born in New York and never lived there.
Rudy Giuliani has been plugging away at the carpetbagger charge and plans his own fundraiser in Arkansas to highlight her New York "blow-in" status.
Hillary was ready for the carpetbagger question, which she acknowledged disarmingly was "very fair". "I think I have some real work to do, to get out and listen and learn from the people of New York and demonstrate that what I'm for may be as important, if not more important, than where I'm from."
Then it was off to do some listening. Lined up were carefully selected panels to discuss issues of education, healthcare and the problems of the elderly, all favourite topics of hers.
The media circus squeezed into the meeting places in a university college in Oneonta, a hospital in Cooperstown, a community hall in Utica and tried to maintain interest as the earnest but dull discussions droned on.
Hillary's political advisers, like Mandy Grunwald who advised Bill Clinton in his first bid for the Presidency, have made little secret that the tactic in the first stages of her campaign is to "bore" the media so that the circus aspect quickly winds down. There are 16 months to go in this campaign and it would drive everyone crazy if this week's media intensity were to keep going.
George Stephanopoulos, another former political adviser to President Clinton, who is in disfavour after his book on his years in the White House, has urged the First Lady "to become such an ordinary part of the New York landscape that reporters no longer think of you as a curiosity. In fact you actually want the press to get a little bored of you personally. Once the thrill is gone, they'll start writing about your ideas and not just your celebrity."
This could be risky. The tabloid New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, loathes the Clintons and now that Hillary, whom it calls "Hil", has dared to seek office in the Big Apple the newspaper is tearing into her as if she was Vlad the Impaler. "She'd be nothing but an empty carpetbag," crowed one headline this week, while on another page a columnist wrote about a "deeper disorder afflicting the First Lady, a woman so deluded, she believes she can bend the rules, stomp on friends and squander taxpayer money without penalty".
The Post won't let this campaign become boring, and Rudy Giuliani will not let go of the carpetbagger sneer. And there is genuine unease about a First Lady campaigning with White House privileges.
In 1994, Robert F. Kennedy was also labelled a carpetbagger when he ran for the Senate from New York, but he won the seat with the help of the Lyndon Johnson landslide that year against Barry Goldwater.
This could be a much tougher race for Hillary Clinton. The early favourable poll ratings for her against Giuliani have now moved downwards. Even some Democrats are grumbling about the "Clinton fatigue" factor. "Why don't the Clintons just go home to Arkansas and build a presidential library?" can be heard even from some liberal Democrats.
That will be his future role. She has her sights just now on being junior senator from the Empire State.